Grid computing is nowadays an established technology, which offers an alternative to
traditional HPC resources. Grid has proven to be a great infrastructure to perform
climate experiments that involve large amounts of independent simulations such as
ensemble predictions and sensitivity analysis. But, the heterogeneity and distributed
nature of Grid poses new challenges to climate applications willing to exploit them.
During last 10 years, the Santander Meteorology Group has been involved in developing
frameworks that allow climate models to make an efficient use of Grid resources. This
work started in the EELA project, where a framework prototype was used to simulate El
Niño phenomenon with the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM) on the EGEE
infrastructure. An evolved version of this first prototype was used to create WRF4G
(EGI application), which allow to run the Weather Researcher and Forecasting (WRF)
regional model on distributed infrastructures. WRF4G can be executed on both Grid and
HPC infrastructures and, today, it contributes to international initiatives such as
CORDEX and European FP7 projects such as SPECS and EUPORIAS.
Acknowledgment
This work is partially funded by the Spanish PLAN NACIONAL de I+D+i 2008-2011 (WRF4G,
Ref.# CGL2011-28864) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).